Literary Remains

by R. B. Russell

  ‘Yes, and they were together, married, for some years. Anyhow, he died, apparently, a few years back, and for all his faults, which were many, he left her with a rather magnificent house in Wales; borders country, near Hereford. It was in Hereford that I met her. She is really rather attractive, you know.’ ‘She was rather plain when I knew her.’

  ‘She’s blossomed. Handsome might be the word now. And this chap’s money and background obviously brought out an elegance in her. You know, she dresses well, and obviously looks after herself. She’s got a good figure, but that might be the illness…’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She didn’t say exactly, and I didn’t like to pry, but I assume it’s cancer. She’s been having treatment, and apparently it’s working. She insisted that she isn’t going to die, or anything like that. But it’s been costly. She went private, because that’s what she’d always done with her husband, and one day she discovered that he hadn’t left her with as much money as she’d thought. It turns out that she’s actually in debt, thanks to some very incautious investments he made just before his death.’

  ‘And she hadn’t realised this when they’d wound up his estate?’

  ‘No, it’s a complete cock-up, apparently. She’s furious with the solicitors, and she’ll try and sue them, once she’s well again.’

  ‘She’ll have to sell the house, I assume?’

  ‘That was my immediate reaction as well. She told me that she’d put it on the market for the best part of a million pounds. And then a prospective buyer had had a survey done, and it’s got subsidence. She hadn’t noticed the cracks, apparently. She got quotes for remedial work, but it’s so bad the recommendation is to tear the place down and rebuild it. The house is actually a liability.’

  ‘Poor Cara!’

  ‘The stupid thing is that the house isn’t about to fall down. It’ll stand without being any danger to it’s occupants for another fifty, perhaps a hundred years. But the engineer’s reports make it unsaleable. She’s effectively penniless… And she can’t work because of her illness… And she can’t even get social security because they argue that she’s got the asset of the house, which, at the moment, they refuse to believe she can sell.’

  ‘So what’s she doing? Is anyone helping?’

  ‘She hasn’t a family to help, and there’s nothing left of her husband’s family. She’s no friends to talk of—he wouldn’t let her have friends.’

  ‘Is nobody helping?’

  ‘Well,’ James Tobin coughed, embarrassed. ‘I have given her some money.’

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  ‘It’s a little awkward. I have some savings, not much, and I haven’t been able to tell my wife.’

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t know you’ve helped Cara?’

  ‘No, well, I gave Cara two thousand pounds. It’s a big chunk out of our savings, and how do I explain to my wife that I gave it to an old school friend, who I didn’t even know well at the time? In fact, she needs twice the amount again, soon, or she’ll end up in court, or worse. My wife would ask where I met her, and I’d say on a business trip, and then she’d ask if she’s good-looking, and I’d have to lie and say no. And she’d think that I was getting something in return…’

  There was a pause, and then I asked the obvious question:

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘She’s been very grateful. And I know that she’s desperate, and I realise that from the outside it looks like I’m taking advantage…’

  I sat back in my chair. At some point in his story I had moved forward in the seat, but now I wanted to put some distance between this obscene man and myself. I had noted that he looked old and fleshy, and now I noticed the red veins on his nose that suggested too much alcohol, and the curdled look to the whites of his bleary eyes. He was obviously rather vain, wearing flashy cuff-links, but looking for flaws I saw the dirt under his fingernails, and a stain from the evening’s food on his rather ludicrous cravat.

  And, of course, all this was against the picture that had been drawn of poor Cara, attractive and helpless, and preyed on by this bloated and unpleasant man. I’d never liked him at school, in fact I suddenly remembered various instances at school when I had been rather revolted by him. It also seemed creepy that a person I didn’t know well, many years ago, still remembered my old girlfriends as pretty. He had mentioned a Sara, and must, I now decided, have meant Sara Howard. We’d only been good friends, but he was probably envious of that friendship as well.

  ‘Would you give me Cara’s address?’ I asked, businesslike, taking a pen from my pocket and wondering what he could write it on.

  ‘I’m afraid not, old friend,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? I’d like to write and offer to help.’

  ‘Well, although she’s desperate, she’s very embarrassed about her present position. I actually suggested that she might have some old friends who could help out. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of old school friends, but she insisted no. It’s pride, I assume. She said that the few people who’d remember her wouldn’t remember her fondly.’

  ‘Well, that’s rubbish,’ I said, feeling my way carefully and cautiously. This monster of a man, her so-called ‘friend’, held the secret of her whereabouts, and had to be played carefully. I was at a loss to know how to get the information out of him.

  ‘I have a friend,’ I started to make up the story as I went along, ‘who is a lawyer, who could help her. He’s very good, and as a favour to me he could at the very least deal with the social security people in a single phone call. And then he could certainly help her realise the value of her property…’ I was noticing the flaws in this story as I went along, but decided that confidence might just get me through. ‘What’s her married name, and address? A phone number would be useful.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he shook his head heavily. ‘She has a firm of solicitors on the case already. It wouldn’t be possible to bring someone else in just like that.’

  ‘Look here. I want to help. I can’t bear the thought that she’s in such distress.’

  ‘Who’s in distress?’ asked Sally, our hostess, who had abruptly turned her attention away from the small party looking at a pile of records on the coffee table.

  ‘An old school friend of ours,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, James was asking about you earlier because he said that he thought he was at school with you! What a wonderful surprise.’

  ‘It turns out that a mutual friend is in a terrible state at the moment,’ I explained. ‘James has very kindly been helping her out, and I want to do my bit too.’

  ‘Of course you must!’

  ‘All I have to do is persuade James to let me know her address.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be quite right,’ he explained patiently, ‘to give out such personal details when I’ve been particularly asked not to.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Sally exclaimed. ‘If she needs help, you’ve got to both help. After all, you are all old friends.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I agreed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Now isn’t the time, or place, really. It’s late, and I ought to be going soon. Perhaps we should meet tomorrow? I’m only in London until the weekend. I could sound her out about your offer by phone in the morning. And at lunch decide where to go from there?’

  And that was the end of the party. James Tobin left with the promise to let me pay for the meal the next day, and Sally was inordinately proud of her achievement in reuniting old friends who would be able to be such a help to each other. I asked her how she had met James.

  ‘A wonderful coincidence. We met on the train coming up from Devon, and we got into conversation. It seems that he was a good friend of my late brother when he was in the army!’

  After a good night’s sleep, and with a full morning before I met with James for lunch, I should have had time to question quite what had happened that previous evening. To a dispassionate outside observer, one who was not desperate to chivalrously help out
an old girlfriend, and rescue her from a rather repugnant dragon, it seems obvious that I should have been more cautious. Coincidences were natural, as he had explained, but that he should also have known Sally’s late brother was extending the lengths to which coincidence could comfortably be pushed.

  But he played his part so well. At the café the next day he appeared in a hurry, and apologised that he could only stay for a short time and would only have a starter with me, and no wine. It was me who suggested the writing of the cheque for four thousand pounds, and he who was very unwilling to take it. He told me that he had talked with Cara on the telephone that morning and she was very uncertain about accepting help from me. He explained that he would pass on a cheque from me made out to her, with a note of my address, and then it was up to her whether she bank it and get into contact. He played the part of grudging go-between very well, and I came away from our brief meeting believing that I had managed to get around his attempts to block direct contact with Cara. For the rest of the day I was rather pleased with myself, and that evening I dug out of the attic my old photograph albums. It was then that I realised what had probably happened.

  I had no formal class or year photographs, but I had several of a school play, and quite a few taken on the very last day of school. There was Cara, in two photographs, and I admit that I went rather misty-eyed over them. And then, in another photograph, there was James Tobin in the background. It was unmistakably James Tobin, and how I had accepted the man at the party and in the restaurant as him was beyond me. Yes, James was quite a large boy, and his sharp features would undoubtedly have become blurred if he had gained further weight, but the profile of his nose was unmistakable, and it was not the nose of the man who had recently claimed his identity. The more I thought about it, the more the impostor also seemed too short.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept replaying our conversation over in my head and realising that he had offered very little information, and had expected me to guess his name, and to suggest who my girlfriends had been. And yet I didn’t want it to be so. I wanted his story to be true so that I could play the gallant friend to Cara, and, less selflessly, not have been the dupe of a con-man’s trick. Ungallantly I was unable to believe how much better it would be if it was just a trick because then it would mean that he had never met Cara, and that she was probably happily married, living in Surbiton with three children.

  I did not really need to lose any sleep, because as soon as the bank opened in the morning I could arrange to have the cheque stopped—it would be that easy—and indeed that’s exactly what I did. My account was untouched, and I never heard from ‘James Tobin’ again. It was a curious sensation; like narrowly avoiding a car accident.

  Of course, I alerted Sally, who told me that she had very much doubted that ‘James’ had ever been in the army with her brother (‘he was obviously not a military man’), but she couldn’t see that he had gained anything from her apart from a free meal and entertainment.

  The incident appeared to be effectively ended. I didn’t tell Sally, or anyone else about the cheque I had written and then had to go to the bank to stop. I was not defrauded, and if I was to be honest, I felt a complete fool for ever having been taken in. I considered going to the police, but made the excuse that there was no way that I could do anything but give a vague description of a fat man in a white linen suit. It was a pathetic excuse, of course, because the real motive was my embarrassment. I should have considered the possibility that I might be able to stop others from being defrauded by him, but I preferred to try and forget the whole thing. And I did, for about a month.

  The handwritten envelope appeared on my doormat with the other mail and I didn’t even stop to look at the handwriting or the postmark. I started reading without looking at the ‘Nr Hereford’ address at the top of the page, and was baffled by the first couple of lines and had to look at and decipher the signature before it all came back to me, and my heart started pounding horribly. It read:

  Llanfihangel House

  C—H—

  Nr Hereford

  Dear Christopher

  I think that I understand why you did what you did. I know you offered help for all the right reasons, and then withdrew that help with equally as valid motives. I immediately tried to bank your very generous cheque for £4,000, and would have replied with great thanks immediately, but other pressures kept me from writing. And then I was informed that the cheque would not be honoured.

  Dear James has been so kind, and so generous, and if I come through this unscathed it will be him that I have to thank. He tells me that you remember me fondly, and that is more than I can hope for.

  With love,

  Cara.

  Guilt overwhelmed me. How could I have doubted the man calling himself James Tobin. Hadn’t Sally said that he had never tried to defraud her? Perhaps he was just as stupid and socially inept as he had been at school and I had misread the whole situation. There was a phone number on the letter and I phoned it, unhesitating, to try and put things right with Cara. The line was dead, though, and I wondered if it had been cut off. Pathetically I noticed that the letter had been sent with a second class stamp. How could I have been so fanciful and dramatic as to believe that I would have been the target for a confidence trickster? I wanted to rectify my appalling mistake there and then, but I couldn’t just leave everything and drive up to Hereford.

  Perhaps a little explanation of my own situation is required at this point. I am married to Judith, and have two children, Trish and Tom. I manage an electrical goods shop in the west of London, and I desperately want to find another job without such demanding employers. At the time of the dinner party at Sally’s my family were on holiday in Norfolk without me (I had already used up by annual holiday entitlement by taking time off when my mother had died earlier that year). Judith and the children were back home when I received the letter from Cara, and I have to admit that I hid it from my wife. I hadn’t told Judith about meeting ‘James Tobin’ because I was embarrassed, and I decided not to tell her about the letter because it seemed to put me in an even worse light. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that I had been taken in by a con-man, and now I didn’t want to admit that I had believed an old friend was a con-man and that I had acted so badly towards an old friend.

  I should have explained it all to Judith as soon as she returned from Norfolk. Not doing so made it harder to tell her now. With the arrival of the letter I should have insisted in taking the day off work and driven straight up to Hereford to put things right. But I was a coward. There are no other ways of explaining myself. That day I sat in my little office at the back of the shop and wrote several letters to Cara, apologising, explaining, and either enclosing or not enclosing a replacement cheque. I had got myself into a stupid state. With hindsight the best thing would have been to have written and explained everything, and said that I still wanted to help. As I drafted and re-drafted letters a sentence crept in which said ‘I think that it would be best if we met so that I can give you a replacement cheque in person.’ I kept reusing the same line, word for word, and then I suddenly saw how creepy it might look and excised it. On some level I wasn’t admitting to myself, wasn’t I doing just what James had done? And by doubling the amount of the gift was I just trying to look more impressive than him?

  My thought processes were getting more and more convoluted, and the next thought that lodged itself in my mind was that we would really have to meet because her letter may just be a further flourish of the confidence trickster. Simply sending her a cheque in the post, an accomplice could bank it tomorrow and after the minimum number of days had passed they could simply withdraw it all.

  But doubting Cara’s existence made me feel inordinately guilty again. Believing in her made me feel as though I was being tricked. I didn’t feel that I could tell anyone, and I continued to prevaricate and sent no reply as the days passed and I slowly got on with my life. I always intended to tackle the problem, but I always put it off. />
  I hate to admit that it was six months later that I finally went up to visit Llanfihangel House. My shop is a part of a chain and our Birmingham store had been experiencing problems which had led to the dismissal of the manager and under-manager. I was sent up there for two weeks to straighten things out while decisions were made on new appointments and possible in-shop promotions. I started off up the motorway as planned but almost immediately took off on a very long detour. In Hereford itself I telephoned the shop to say that my car had broken down and that I’d be unable to make it in that day. For good measure I phoned Judith and complained of the same thing. She was sympathetic, picturing me hanging around some midlands garage while I waited for the fictional fault to be mended.

  From the letter Llanfihangel House was in a hamlet called C— H—, some ten miles inside the Welsh border. The place was marked on my map, but the black dot seemed to represent an area of very scattered houses without any centre, and I didn’t find the house without first getting lost in a maze of high-banked lanes and odd-looking hills. It was a huge Victorian pile on a rise, surprisingly hard up against the narrow road. I parked in the weedy drive and walked around to the front door which was boarded up and with a ‘Condemned’ notice stuck to it, and a further sign saying that the site was patrolled by a security firm from Welshpool (though this seemed very unlikely). By climbing through a very overgrown flowerbed I could see through the front room window that it was empty. It was so still and quiet, but that was probably the impression any townie would have received in that part of the countryside.

  At a loss to find any local walking around the lanes who could tell me the story of the house and its owner I even tried at the doors of a couple of houses that could hardly have been called neighbouring, but nobody answered except some vicious-looking dogs at one farm. I drove to the local pub, perhaps two miles from the house, and though they provided me with a decent lunch, neither the landlord nor the patrons could give me any information whatsoever.